Julian Assange is a spokesman and advisory board member of WikiLeaks, a transparency website whose mission is to “open governments” and expose human rights abuses. It has a core focus on protecting dissidents, whistleblowers, investigative journalists, and bloggers who face state threats, and it largely operates by publishing leaks of sensitive documents.

Winners of Amnesty International’s 2009 Media Award for exposing extrajudicial assassinations in Kenya, Assange and WikiLeaks have recently launched www.collateralmurder.com, a website that hosts a leaked video of U.S. military forces in Iraq apparently slaying over a dozen people indiscriminately.

In his speech, Assange chooses to focus specifically on WikiLeaks’s work against censorship and human rights abuses committed by Western governments. Paraphrasing Orwell, Assange explains that he who controls today’s internet servers controls the intellectual record of mankind.

He warns us that Western governments, large corporations, and certain wealthy individuals are increasingly able and increasingly trying to remove material permanently from the historical record using sophisticated methods.

Assange reviews WikiLeaks’s work in uncovering human rights abuses at Abu Ghraib, Bagram, and Guantanamo, and discusses the dangerous irony in the U.S. military’s conduct as it decorates its detention centers with “Honor Bound to Defend Freedom” signs.

If the West doesn’t reverse its course of increased censorship and rights abuses, Assange warns, it will lose all of the ideals that it once stood for.

Last Thursday I thought I’d ask the White House a simple question. Is it more important to capture Osama Bin Laden, or to detain and “question” (under the PATRIOT Act, we all know what that can mean.) Julian Assange of WikiLeaks.

I thought this was a no brainer. How wrong, I suppose, I was. At least, for the White House. The decision on what may be declassified has been removed from the Executive Branch of the United States (or any) government, and it seems the Obama administration has yet to figure out how to respond, aside from scheming to capture / detain / or otherwise incarcerate Julian Assange, so that he may be interrogated. With, or Without Due Process. But really now, Patriots! In secret?

Not Bloody Likely.

An absence of answers from the White House Press Office apparently means what? Corking-up WikiLeaks is more important than stopping Al Qaeda?

On Friday morning, I called the White House Press Office again, and repeated that question, and another. I spotted Assange’s interview with abcnews.au wherein he asserted the White House had been approached by the New York Times on behalf of the media partnership, and asked if they would help remove names of our Afghan Friends. The White house “declined.”

I asked, “Is this True?”

Since then, silence.

Seriously. The White House declined an opportunity to protect our “assets”?

Once again, I ask. For the fourth (4th) time since last Thursday 07/29/10:

Which is a greater priority for the White House and Pentagon – capturing Osama Bin Laden, or detaining and “questioning” Julian Assange?

Once again, I ask. For the third (3rd) time since last Friday 07/30/10:

Is it true the White House declined to help the media partnership of NYT/Guardian/DerSpiegel/WikiLeaks to scrub the names of our Human Resources from the War Diaries as part of their Harm Minimisation?

Every single time I have contacted the White House Press Office (“media affairs”) I have identified myself, given a phone number, email address, and identified the blog I publish. Every single time I have been assured You will “get back” to me.

You have not.

Is it because I run a blog, and the White House does not think that merits a response?

Have I received no response because the White House does not think I am qualified as a journalist? Let me assure You, I was trained in Print, Broadcast, and Photo Journalism by the Department of Defense Information School. I served on active duty as an Army Journalist. The paper I worked on won numerous awards during my tenure there.

Please respond to these questions with answers.

As I mentioned this morning when I called around 0715hrs, my headline for my next post on Scribal Thrum will be something like

That means the rest of Us, I guess. The rest of the US Citizenry other than Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove, Gonzales, the weasels in Justice, the NSC, the NSA, the CIA, Blackwater, KBR, the Carlysle Group, Halliburton… the list goes on and on, so long as Your a republican, or a democrat in congress over the past 10 years who acquiesced to “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” white house briefings to the point where they are worried about being co-conspirators implicated in any action towards impeachment and public trials.

Which we need, to repair the rule of law.

Here’s a snip of the very disturbing ACLU report on torture, with Glenn Greenwald of Salon commenting:

I put a lot of work into these…the ACLU Complaint has lots of internal navigation. You can go directly to any page from any page (60 pages), or directly to any of the 195 paragraphs of the complaint from the table of contents, a click away from any page.